The advent of global communication networks, such as the Internet, have brought to the forefront capabilities heretofore considered unthinkable, or at least, impracticable. What was at one time a mechanism for rudimentary data exchange has evolved, and continues to evolve into a means for distributing a wide variety of media.
One particular industry that continues to leverage the capabilities of the Internet involves, in general, multimedia messaging services, and in particular, the application of such services to mobile devices, e.g., cellular telephones. Multimedia is generally considered a disparate collection of technologies that encompass audio, video, text, graphics, facsimile, and telephony, an assorted combination of which provides a rich and more powerful communication experience then does a single media, such as simply a text-based communication. However, convergence of multimedia services for use in mobile devices introduces huge bandwidth concerns that require more sophisticated software and hardware solutions in the device and the associated networks, and which come at increased costs for the consumer.
The demand on the existing infrastructure for providing such high-bandwidth capabilities, especially with respect to video, continues to be a problem as vendors struggle to provide their own networks over which such mobile multimedia devices can operate. Mobile infrastructure vendors have to provide mobile video servers and gateways in their product portfolios to support high-end telephones with such video capabilities. These costs are then passed on to the consumer who subscribes to the particular vendor's mobile telephone service, and which service typically suffers from wireless channel bandwidth limitations that prohibit a large number of customers from benefiting from such technology.
Many households today are served by cable or satellite television providers. Subscribers pay for access to a subset of channels offered by the provider. For example, a cable provider might offer a basic cable subscription and a premium cable subscription, the premium subscription granting access to more television channels. Access to these channels is generally controlled by a cable or satellite decoder box located at the subscriber's premises. Mobile video devices, however, are unable to access cable television because they are not physically connected to the subscriber's decoder box and there is no convenient way to verify that a mobile device should be permitted to access the cable system content.
What is needed are improved devices and systems for facilitating the use of mobile multimedia devices and access to subscription content regardless of location.